Wit & Attitude Quote by Scott Adams

Scott Adams takes a feel-good classroom slogan and snaps it in half to expose the smugness hiding inside it. "There are no stupid questions" is supposed to lower the stakes, a social contract that invites curiosity without shame. Adams flips it into a trap: if questions can never be stupid, stupidity has to show up somewhere else. The joke is that we all know it does. The line works because it forces the listener to confront the difference between a kind policy and an accurate description of reality.

The subtext is less about questions than about competence as performance. "Do they get smart just in time" imagines intelligence as a temporary costume you put on to access the benefits of being taken seriously. That's a pointed jab at the modern ritual of asking questions in public settings - meetings, classrooms, Q&As - where the question is often a bid for status. Sometimes people ask to learn; sometimes they ask to be seen learning. Adams is needling that whole economy of seeming thoughtful.

Context matters: as a cartoonist, Adams is writing in the register of office life and institutional clichés, where motivational language is used to smooth friction and avoid embarrassment. The cynicism lands because it targets a phrase adults repeat even when they don't believe it. The punchline doesn't just mock "stupid people"; it mocks the pretense that we can engineer away judgment with a poster-ready aphorism.